10 Most Obnoxious Stars In Hollywood

You can burn a lot of bridges in fifteen minutes...

By Jack Morrell /

It’s a simple fact of life that there are going to be massive douchecanoes in every job, in every industry and in every walk of life you can think of. Even well known people with fantastic reputations can screw up: for example, Gandhi had remarkably cavalier attitudes towards the appropriateness of his behaviour towards women, while Mother Teresa ran squalid, brutal orphanages and workhouses.

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Hollywood and the craft of acting tend to attract the neurotic and the damaged – after all, this is an occupation that’s all about pretending to be someone else in front of a paying audience who are predisposed to idolise you for it. With the exception of astonishing ubermensch like George Clooney, acting isn’t a vocation that attracts the well-adjusted… but, with handlers and mentors to guide them, most Hollywood stars manage to rein in their worst excesses and act like human beings the vast majority of the time.

And then there’s this motley crew. Coming with more issues than Rolling Stone and Time Magazine combined, fearlessly innovative at being awful, the proud owners of more flaws than the Empire State Building… these are the most obnoxious stars in Hollywood. Grab the popcorn. 

10. Sean Connery

Time for the first entry in this article to ruin some people’s childhoods: Sean Connery, the best Bond, Indiana Jones’ dad, Hollywood’s hardy perennial man’s man (alongside Clint Eastwood) and winner of umpteen ‘sexiest pensioner’ awards, is almost certainly, allegedly, a wifebeater. At least, according to the wife – his ex-wife, the late actor Diane Cilento, to be specific.

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In her 2006 memoirs, Cilento – the mother to Jason, Connery’s only child – claimed that her husband mentally and physically abused her for years, acting out spasms of jealous rage over her own burgeoning film career. Then she mentions how in 1965, shortly after Connery had become famous, he beat her into near unconsciousness at a hotel in Almeria.

If the sudden newsworthy recollection of domestic violence four decades on sounds unlikely to some, let’s not forget that in the same year, Connery gave an interview to Playboy in which he set out his belief that beating a woman is “justified” if she’s “a bitch”:

“I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman - although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man. An open-handed slap is justified: if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it. I think a man has to be slightly advanced, ahead of the woman. I really do - by virtue of the way a man is built, if nothing else. But I wouldn’t call myself sadistic.”

But that was a long time ago, right? He’ll have mellowed in later years, right? Ummm… well, when interviewed twenty years later in 1985, Connery was wholly unrepentant. In point of fact, he genuinely didn’t seem to consider that there might be anything controversial about his comments. You can watch here and see for yourselves, and then mutter something about there being no more heroes anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo0d1zTAFKA

Incidentally, it’s recommended that you don’t click on the Youtube link and read any of the comments on the video if you don’t want your opinion on the XY chromosomed proportion of the human race to go right into the toilet. There are a lot of men out there that feel free to talk about happily inflicting violence on women when they’re safe behind an anonymous user account. 

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